BIOGRAPHY

David Paha (b. 1986) is a composer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist currently living in Chicago. He graduated with honors from Columbia College Chicago receiving a Bachelor of Music in composition. Along with being an active performer in the Chicago music community, David also teaches courses on digital music at Columbia College.

David’s history as a composer spans the concert music realm as well as the pop and experimental territory of the Chicago underground music scene. He spent a majority of the time before school writing, recording and touring various projects as a singer, keyboardist and guitarist. During this time David would meld his interest in the melodic and chord based structures of songwriting with that of ambient/textural sound mass. This melding of techniques would foreshadow David’s emerging interest in contemporary timbral and cognitive composition.

His official studies in composition would further push his interest in contemporary acoustic and electronic music, introducing him to influential composers such as Jurg Frey, Luigi Nono and Giacinto Scelsi. His exposure to such composers, together with the guidance of teachers Marcos Balter and Kenn Kumpf, would inspire new levels of spatial depth to his compositions. David’s most recent works deal with cognitive response to limited auditory events, often placing quiet and slow developing gestures within larger proportions of time to draw a sense of meditation from the instruments.